The most striking observation, although not unexpected, was that they looked at corporate blogging in very different ways, depending on their industry and what they want to achieve. One participant from a broadcasting company was exploring how to weave blogs through their normal activities. Blogs are well on their way to becoming yet another channel they use to communicate the news they collect.

A pharmaceutical company had very different concerns, mainly concerning compliance and control issues. Their regulated industry put very different demands on how to blog. Finally, a financial services company was looking at various aspects, including communicating with customers as well as encouraging internal exchanges. Very different issues arise depending on what the enterprise wants to achieve with their blogging initiatives. All agreed that the technical issues were not really a big problem anymore. They had access to more than enough blogging technology, at least from an EA perspective.

One of the more interesting issues raised by everyone at the session has to do with managing the different personas that people inhabit every day. When someone blogs publicly, are they writing for themselves, or as a representative of the company? Even on an ostensibly private blog, it can be difficult to separate the professional and the private. Different employment relationships muddy the waters as well. When a freelancer or part time employee says something, does it matter less than when employees say it? The level of influence the enterprise will need to assert over these sometimes private/usually professional postings will differ by person, industry, role and company.

I like coming to these conferences which are not 100% in my coverage area, because the participants often have a different perspective than the customers I commonly talk with. Enterprise architects often deal with collaboration issues, but they also usually have a broader brief. The wider field of operations they deal with often delivers different views. Rather than adoption or technical issues, they are asking how it affects the enterprise as a whole, and what policies and plans to put in place.

#GartnerPCC picks up tomorrow. I’m also looking forward to going deeper into these issues with collaboration practitioners.

This year, Microblogging (which includes the Twitter service) has crested the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is beginning to move into the Trough of Disillusionment. Some people disagreed with the placement of the dot, but that’s to be expected. From an unscientific survey, about as many people felt microblogging still had plenty of hype left in it as thought it was well onto the Slope of Enlightenment. So that’s OK. If the critics are all over the map, then the position is probably just about right.

It was also apparent that many people don’t really get how the cycle works. The most prevalent Tweet said some variation on “Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down.” Many commentators seemed to think that moving towards the trough meant that Twitter was over, never to be heard from again.

Actually, microblogging is moving along the cycle rather smartly. The structure of the hype cycle means that everything goes through the trough, before it reaches the plateau of productivity and wide adoption. Moving into the trough is therefore, a good thing for someone’s favorite technology, but not without risks. It is far worse for a technology to languish on the up side of the peak, never to approach wide adoption. Other technologies whiz quickly through the trough to reach the slope and onto the plateau.

The Twitter backlash has certainly begun, and many are piling on enthusiastically. I am not one of them, but there are definite indications that microblogging will have a difficult time getting through the trough. Moving into the enterprise will be especially tricky, one of the necessary steps to really achieve productivity. While there are several enterprise microblogging platforms out there, one of Twitter’s attractions is the massive volume of Twitterers and the amount of content they generate. Recreating that internally will be hard. Some companies have achieved successes, and I would love to talk to any others I haven’t spoken with. But it will be more difficult for microblogging to jump from the consumer to the enterprise market than many other collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging.

Japanese companies are very interested in social software technologies, why companies are deploying them, and the benefits they expect to achieve. Comparatively few have active deployments, but the curiosity and level of interest is quite high. Many of the questions and concerns are predictably about security, governance, control and business benefits. In the consensus-driven culture of many Japanese companies, free-wheeling social software sites sound strange and chaotic.

Familiarity with social software concepts is quite high through consumer services. Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn haven’t made much impact in Japan but mixi and many mobile phone-based communities have already become an important part of people’s lives.

Twitter, inevitably, also came up often.The whole concept seemed strange to many of the people I talk to, even more so than usual. When someone explained that it is common for Japanese to update their personal blogs dozens of times per day from their mobile phones, I began to see why the appeal of Twitter was so hard to grasp. Western Blogs are usually longer posts updated several times per week or month. Japanese mix the short and long form. They’ve been Twittering for years, so they don’t see the point of microblogging; it’s nothing new.

Some companies are doing interesting things, as a panel at the conference showed. Panelists from Ricoh, CSK Holdings and Tokyo Marine discussed how they are using blogs and wikis in several different ways to facilitate sharing among customers, employees and partners.

The level of interest and depth of questions gave me the impression that there is more activity than might be readily apparent. Several of the companies I spoke with were actively watching what other companies were doing and looking for cases where they could begin to use social software technologies internally. It reminds me of the image of a Harrier jump jet, which runs its engines for several minutes before taking off. In that pre-launch phase, it looks like nothing is happening, but inside it is building up power. When it does take off, it goes straight up, very fast. i suspect that Japanese adoption of social software will be similar, with a long period of preparation and then quick adoption once they finally start.

As well as hitting the visitor high spots like a karaoke bar and marveling at the controlled chaos of the Shibuya intersection, I got to try out some ideas I will be presenting at the PCC conference in Orlando, Florida June 8-10 (not much time at home this time of year). Just one of the reasons I appreciated being able to make this trip. I really want to thank the event organizers at Gartner Japan for giving me the chance, and the customers, vendors and journalists who gave me so much of their time and insights.

I never really bought into the idea that Twitter would eventually have to start taking advertising or charge users directly. Charging individual users would certainly drive many people away, this hoax announcement notwithstanding. Unless done extremely carefully, so would advertising in the way most web sites do it. More people access Twitter using third party client software like Twhirl or Tweetdeck than go to the Twitter.com site anyway, so conventional advertising potential is limited.

Twitter must avoid doing anything that could reduce the number of people who use it or how often they tweet. Twitter’s real value is in the volume. Millions of people make around 6 million tweets per day, by one count, turning Twitter into a world-wide, real time twitching, tweeting sensing system. If you want to know what people are saying about your product, your candidate, your television show or your research report, then Twitter is the place to look. Companies would be willing to pay much more for better access to this content than a more functional client or some ads. There is much more value to be made by analyzing and feeding real time feedback. Twitter has already experimented with this model by working with the Current cable television channel to feed real time election Tweets during the US presidential election. They could easily take this much further. I think this is the kind of thing that Biz Stone is talking about when talks about opportunities in providing better services to businesses.

I admire her (whatever her name was) because she gave the small group of students who were interested enough 24 hour access to the terminal room and all the technical documentation we could digest. She was one training course ahead of us, so she generously gave her time answering questions and then got out of our way and let us explore this fun new machine. I cannot remember her name, because I honestly haven’t thought of her in many years. But in many ways she was responsible for my career (such as it is).

According to Malcolm Gladwell, I was a little bit too young and didn’t spend nearly enough time on the computer to really be good at it. But those hours spent in the basement introduced me to computers as something fun and interesting. We learned all about the Pr1mos operating system (not that it helped my CV much; anyone remember that?) while figuring out how to send “letter bombs,” i.e. messages that used obscure control characters to freeze the recipient’s terminal after displaying an elaborate ASCII “bomb” (that was a great hit about 4:00 am the day that term papers were due). Or programming a phantom (think daemon under UNIX) to compute as many digits of Pi as possible, an idea ripped off of a Star Trek episode. After about two weeks, I got a message from the administrator saying they had killed the phantom, since it was eating into the processor power they needed to run payroll. I had neglected to save the output anywhere, so I never knew how far it got.

I am deeply appreciative that my first encounter with computers was not forbidding and scary, but fun and adventurous. It allowed me to see them as toys to play with rather than something fragile or intimidating. I’m glad that I can approach a keyboard and try things out, just to see what happens. Sometimes that goes wrong (like when I shut down a system I didn’t realize was multiuser to stop a program I couldn’t control), but not very wrong. I am sure that the woman with the fan would appreciate that too. She doesn’t look like she would be intimidated by a mere device. Thank you, Mrs. <whatever your name was> and thank you Ada for making me think of her.

Vendors are responding by improving the controls they offer for deciding how much to expose, to whom. This is a great first step, but the real breakthrough must come in the user interface. As this article points out, there are quite a few possibilities, but how many people really take the time and effort to carefully go through and consider who should see what? 

It is not uncommon to receive ten or more invitations per day. I quickly sift through the people who read my name somewhere, but don’t really know me. But many are more subtle. How much do I want an analyst relations person from a vendor I am covering to know about me? Or a client? Or my boss? I sometimes use Hellotxt.com to propagate postings across many different sites. It is much easier and faster than going to each individual site. But I have to force myself to think whether what I am saying really belongs in all of those places.

The problem is that I really am acting in several different personas all the time. In my head, I slip between being a sometimes snarky commentator, professional analyst,  new acquaintance, old friend, fan, brother, husband… Translating the different roles I play from second to second from my head to my keyboard is a far too manual process, and manual processes are very error-prone.

The great designer/entrepreneur who comes up with an effective way to manage the different personas people inhabit stands to make a fortune. It was the suppliers to miners who made the lasting riches in the California Gold Rush. The same thing is poised to happen again with the social media gold rush. Many of the first order sites will do fine. But the second and third order services that make it possible to use the sites effectively and safely will be an even bigger opportunity.

It is not really noteworthy that Yahoo selected a capable woman as CEO to replace Jerry Yang. CEOs who are women are hardly new anymore. What piqued my attention was that the other leading candidate (Susan Decker, currently president) was also a woman. Real progress will be evident when nothing to do with gender and high profile appointments, or low profile ones, is notable. We aren’t there yet, but this is encouraging.

I am not a heavy Tweeter. I have sent out 1,457 Tweets and have accumulated 460 followers. According to Tweetstats, I have averaged four tweets per day, and sent the most messages in October. According to Twitter Grader, I am in the top 98.3% (#13,663 out of 952,391) of the Twitterverse. These are not particularly great numbers, but they work for me. The rock stars of Twitter spend most of their day doing little else but reading, replying and tweeting. I like to think I have a life that won’t allow that. I also have a job, that requires a bit more depth than the average tweet.

The reason I first started tweeting is that I find it hard to find the time to do proper blogs. I need to write research notes, and have more ideas than discipline, so the regularity of this blog sometimes suffers. I can handle 140 character mind squirts though. They just fit into my day better.

My time spent on Twitter has been rewarding. It alerts me to what is going on, connects me to old friends, and introduces me to many people whom I think are worth knowing. I have used it to test out ideas that eventually make their way into this blog or my more formal research notes. Twitter points me to people saying interesting things on their blogs. I can tap into expertise on travel and silly things like the best brand of tea bags to use if you want to use them in the garden. Apparently, Celestial seasonings and PG Pyramids don’t have those paper tags that inhibit mulching.

Twitter also helped us close a sale. I noticed that someone was saying they were having trouble reaching their Gartner account rep. I passed the contact on, and one of our sales people was able to close a deal very quickly. I don’t expect to get that much direct business value every day, but it’s a nice way of justifying something I like doing.

Instead, I want to talk about 10 anti-resolutions for 2009. They are anti in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but stuff that I hope that other people will do. I find that a lot easier. It’s also generally what analysts do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what others should do. Most them are also anti because they describe something that I hope won’t happen anymore rather than new things that should happen. I am generally not a negative person, but there’s a lot of undesirable activity going on out there. After reading this, please stop it. Thank you.

1. Enterprises will stop fixating on social software gew gaws and competitive product horse races and put energy into achieving collaboration effectiveness.
   I talk with many customers who are primarily interested in what new features vendors have packed into their products, or the competitive position between a group of vendors, all of whom are viable and could meet their needs. These things are surely interesting and sometimes important, but rarely are they the main drivers for success.  Instead, focus on the best ways to work together and what kinds of input or feedback will help you, your colleagues or your customers be more effective. Look for the bottlenecks that kill productivity. Find the spots where conflict and arguments arise; that is usually where more collaboration will help. Comparing features and competition can be fun, but these activities will be far more effective.
2. Vendors will lessen their emphasis on new features and functionality, and help their customers get stuff done.
   It’s not just the enterprises that need to shift; vendors have their part to play. Too many vendors still consider their job is done when the software is delivered, at least until they have to convince the customer to upgrade to the next version. Making sure customers use the current version effectively is far more useful than pushing out another 150 APIs or increasing the number of themes from 20 to 100.
3. Vendors will get realistic about their positions.
   Analysts spend a lot of time arguing with vendors. Sometimes it is because we are wrong. Often it is because we say things that they know are true, but really, really don’t want us to say publicly. I can understand this; I was a vendor once, and it is never pleasant when people say bad things about you. But I would rather put my energy into other things, so I hope that some of them would look at their strengths and weaknesses more realistically.
4. Security and social software people will stop talking past each other.
   I have seen too many entrenched positions among the social software and security constituencies in my clients, the vendor community and even between analysts. Social software people must not assume that there are no risks and all security measures stem from paranoia and are unreasonable restrictions to be circumvented. Security people must not assume that social software has no business value therefore no risks are acceptable. They need to talk to each other rather than past each other.
5. Network communications and collaboration people will stop fighting.
   Market shifts cause tension for vendors and among the customers they server. As traditional collaboration vendors (like Microsoft) offer voice services and traditional communications vendors (like Cisco) start to offer collaboration products, the different IT departments aligned with these areas are bumping up against each other. Like with security, these groups need to stop talking past each other, and talk to each other.
6. Vendors will stop pitting different user constituencies against each other.
   Some vendors find an advantage in encouraging tension between their customers’ departments. I hate that. I hope it stops. 
7. There will be effective help managing overlapping life and work personas
   The lines between work and private activities have been blurring for some time. The rise of social media is about to obliterate what distinctions still remain. While I keep this Gartner blog separate from my private blog, I use Twitter to track and broadcast both private and business ideas, which makes me distinctly uncomfortable sometimes. Better help in maintaining the differences that need to remain will become much more important in 2009.
8. There will be more help managing personas in general.
   Personas and the tools to manage them should become big in 2009. Users need to be able to control easily and transparently the roles they are acting in, whether private or professional, buyer or seller, commenter or writer, parent or child, producer or consumer, and on and on. The current tools are way to rudimentary.
9. Video will stop being the Next Big Thing and finally become the Current Big Thing.
   Videoconferencing has been the The Next Big Thing since the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, which saw the first video phone.  In almost 45 years, it has stubbornly refused to become the current big thing, however. Room-based video systems are unwieldy and disruptive. Some companies use them effectively, but I cannot begin to count how many meeting rooms I have been in where the video equipment sits in the corner with a tangle of connectors and cables sitting on top of it. Cheap desktop webcams and high end telepresence systems are making video more accessible and a much better experience respectively. The trouble is that most people want low cost AND great quality. It would be nice if those came together in 2009.
   

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10. No one will “Reply all” to more than ten people.
    Yeah, that would be nice.

The last reason these are anti-resolutions is that I don’t really think that any of them will happen in 2009. We will make progress on some of them, but none of them will be fully achieved, which is a good thing.  That leaves something for analysts like me to write about in 2009, and then some.

Luckily, most of the online commentary has been positive or at least thoughtful, with only a few gripes. Some people obviously have never put on an high profile event with 6000 attendees. Tellingly, when I reached out to some of the gripers for more info, they didn’t answer. I think they expect that they are complaining in to the air; they seem surprised and even disconcerted when it is obvious that we (or at least some of us) are listening.

I am tempted to have a Tweetscan window open during my presentations to see how it is coming over, but that is probably not a good idea. Concentrating on the ideas I want to get over and not fall over my feet take all my attention.

I appreciate the praise (obviously) and thoughtful comments which make me reexamine the ideas in my research, and many assumptions. I like hearing objections and different ways of thinking.  I’ve always found that a good analyst is one who can listen as well as pontificate, although we tend to do a lot more of the latter. These social channels provide an additional way for me to listen. I can only hope that I do it well.